Informed by the embodied perspective on humanizing pedagogy, this study examines how one Afro-Puerto Rican and one African American teacher candidate explored humanizing pedagogical possibilities during their urban fieldwork through multimodal counternarratives. By telling counter-stories through drawing bodies and mapping pedagogical spaces,…

Educational innovations with emerging technologies often disregard the potential historical and cultural damage of those technologies, which further disenfranchises Indigenous communities from a fruitful relationship with them. This is especially true for narrative-based digital technologies, because storytelling is held as a sacred practice of…

In this article, the authors illustrate how teachers use a strength based, culturally responsive Response to Intervention (RTI) framework to meet the varied needs of a culturally diverse, twice-exceptional student. Using a case-based approach, the authors demonstrate how classroom teachers and specialists collaborate with the student and her…

In order to bring music of Puerto Rico to the general music classroom, it is important to understand the sociocultural and sociohistorical context of the music. The traditional genre of plena shares cultural threads with West Africa, Spain, and indigenous (Taíno) culture. Commonly known as "El Periodico Cantado" (the singing newspaper),…

Carmen Montañez's novel "Pelo bueno, pelo malo" acknowledges the struggle that some Caribbean individuals face in accepting their blackness. The novel integrates the union of ancestors with the living, thus reflecting the Bantu concept known as "Muntu". This Puerto Rican novel presents a deep social problem of internalized…

Historically, black women's hair has been a site where power and social relations are defined. In Puerto Rico, cultural production has been critical in perpetuating as well as in contesting the prevailing white European ideal of beauty and its impact on women's hairstyling practices. Nevertheless, the link between aesthetic preferences and the…

In this article, I examine two visions of bilingual education that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement: race radicalism and liberal multiculturalism. I argue that although proponents of both visions believed that bilingual education was necessary for empowering language-minoritized populations, race radicalism conceptualized this empowerment…

This article writes the histories of CUNY Open Admissions and hiphop toward each other, illuminating both. Bringing Open Admissions to bear on hiphop history helps us see that, while historians locate the birth of hiphop culture in a 1970s New York gutted by divestment and displacement, in fact the decade before hiphop's birth was characterized by…

This article explores the concept of "syncretism," its history, related concepts, and potential as a research tool. It proposes a critical syncretism for analyzing the syncretic literacy projects of three young Puerto Rican bilinguals with attention to their agency and creativity drawing on diverse languages and literacies and…

The district's overall average SAT score of 1507 exceeded the state (1432) and the national (1497) averages. Highlights from the 2014 SAT test are provided in this report.

This article applies social constructionism and groupism theory to discourses on language officialization in Puerto Rico. It examines three argumentative texts presented prior to the passage of Law #4 in 1991 making Spanish the sole official language of the island. Grounded critical discourse theory maintains that language form and content are…

Puerto Rican children's literature reflects the complex history of Puerto Rico, an island that has been perpetually under colonial rule. Island and US Puerto Ricans represent a cultural identity with indefinite geographical, national and linguistic borders. Although both groups have created distinct communities, both remain loyal to Spanish as a…

We examined the persistence of psychiatric disorders at approximately 18 and 30 months after a hurricane among a random sample of the child and adolescent population (4-17 years) of Puerto Rico. Data were obtained from caretaker-child dyads (N = 1,886) through in person interviews with primary caretakers (all children) and youth (11-17 years)…

This article focuses on the complex web of issues involved in Esmeralda Santiago's acculturation to US society after arriving from Puerto Rico as a girl. The article is based on examples from Santiago's second memoir, "Almost a Woman" (1998) and the 2001 film adaptation of this memoir; the observations of critics who have written about…

This article focuses on the intersections among language, literacy, and culture, and what these intersections have meant for the author personally, and what they can mean for students who have been marginalized, neglected, or made invisible by traditional understandings of the role of education. Although not linked conceptually in the past, the…